At Pillar, we operate on a simple but powerful philosophy: your body is a laboratory, not a battlefield. This means every step of your fitness journey is an experiment, and the goal is not punishment, but discovery. So, when you ask how to create a workout plan, what you’re really asking is, “How do I form a good hypothesis?” A workout plan isn’t a rigid set of rules; it’s a structured experiment designed to produce a specific, measurable result. It’s the practical application of our first pillar: Stimulus.
The Foundation: Your Workout Plan as a Scientific Hypothesis
The Stimulus pillar is all about applying a targeted signal to your body to prompt a desired adaptation, like building strength or increasing endurance. To do this effectively, you must embrace the Principle of Rationale—understanding the ‘why’ behind your actions. A plan without a rationale is just a guess. A plan with a rationale is a testable hypothesis.
Creating your plan is a four-step process of defining your experiment.
Step 1: Define Your Objective (The Principle of Specificity)
Before you choose a single exercise, you must define your primary objective. What adaptation are you seeking? Do you want to increase your deadlift, run a faster 5k, or build bigger shoulders? The answer dictates the entire structure of your plan.
This is guided by a core concept in exercise science: the principle of specificity. This principle states that the adaptations your body makes are directly related to the type of training you perform (1). To become a better runner, you must run. To lift heavier weight, you must practice lifting heavy weight. Your training must be relevant to your goal. Therefore, the first step in creating your workout plan is to clearly state your objective.
- Bad Objective: “I want to get in shape.” (Too vague)
- Good Objective: “I want to increase my bench press by 20 pounds in the next 12 weeks.” (Specific, measurable, and time-bound)
Step 2: Determine Your Frequency (How Often to Test)
Once you know your goal, you must decide how often you will apply the stimulus. A common question is whether a 3-day or 5-day per week plan is better. Science, however, tells us this may be the wrong question.
Recent meta-analyses comparing different training frequencies have found that when the total weekly training volume is equal, there is no significant difference in muscle growth or strength gains between lower and higher frequencies (2). This is empowering. It means that training frequency is not a rigid rule but a flexible variable you can adjust to fit your life. The key is ensuring you achieve sufficient weekly volume.
Choosing your frequency is a logistical decision, not a magical one.
- 3 Days/Week (e.g., Full Body): Allows for more recovery days. Each session will need to be higher in volume to achieve the weekly goal.
- 4-5 Days/Week (e.g., Upper/Lower or Body Part Split): Distributes the total volume across more sessions. This can make individual workouts shorter and may allow for higher quality work in each session as fatigue is lower.
Choose the frequency that you can consistently adhere to, as consistency is the foundation of any successful experiment.
Step 3: Select Your Stimulus (The Exercises)
With your objective and frequency defined, you can now select the specific exercises that will form your stimulus. This, again, comes back to the principle of specificity. Your exercises should directly support your goal.
- For Strength: Your plan should be built around the main compound movements you want to improve (e.g., squat, bench press, deadlift). Assistance exercises should be chosen to strengthen weak points in those main lifts.
- For Hypertrophy (Muscle Growth): Your plan will include a wider variety of exercises, including both compound and isolation movements, to ensure you are stimulating all the muscles in the target group from different angles.
- For Endurance: Your plan will be dominated by the primary activity (e.g., running, cycling) at varying intensities and durations.
Step 4: Implement Progression (The Engine of Your Plan)
A workout plan is not static. An experiment that never changes will eventually stop producing new results. The engine that drives adaptation is progressive overload. This means that over time, you must systematically increase the demand placed on your body. Without it, your body will adapt to the initial stimulus and then have no further reason to change.
There are many ways to apply this principle, and understanding what is progressive overload? is critical to long-term success. You can:
- Increase the weight.
- Increase the number of reps.
- Increase the number of sets.
- Decrease rest time between sets.
Your plan should have a clear method for progression built into it from day one.
Conclusion: Test, Audit, Refine
The best way to create a workout plan is to stop thinking of it as a perfect, permanent document. Instead, view it as your initial hypothesis in an exciting, long-term experiment with yourself. By defining your objective, choosing a sustainable frequency, selecting specific exercises, and planning for progression, you create a powerful and intelligent stimulus. From there, you simply run the experiment and use our other pillars—Nourish, Regenerate, and especially Audit—to analyze the data and refine your approach for continuous, sustainable progress.